I'll be stepping back from leading product for X

Who are the flipping robots you're talking about? Do you mean HN posters or X users?

It's a shame you've had such a poor experience on X. The site isn't perfect by any means, but it's become one of the only places online for new humor. The fact that reddit, Imgur, and Instagram front pages are frequently just X screenshots is a good indicator that this platform still has legs.

Where did you read that engagement was down? I was under the impression the platform was getting more usage than ever.

I'm not sure I agree. My experience of Twitter was that the web app was reasonable and reliable. That reliability seems to me to have been collateral in the transition, a bunch of things broke, famously 2FA for a while, a few redirects broke in the domain switch, the public access lockdown also presented as server errors and 404s for a while until the necessary error states were added, and it has had some spotty downtime. Most of these things are better now than a year ago, but not all, and that's only getting back towards what it was before.

The only notable feature addition I'm aware of is Grok, and again that's pretty debatable.

So I'm interested in what you think has improved. Maybe I'm missing things, but it's not my perception.

But considering they’ve also drastically reduced the quality of content on the platform, one could say they’ve done casual users a favor.

Sure, the site is still working, but to call it improved is stretching the word to its breaking point

I enjoy it now as a daily ritual of how incompetent the everything app is.

Now THAT is an improved web experience!

you say this like it had anywhere to go but up.

Remind me again how anyone over there is doing a great job.

Really not what Twitter used to be about.

It is possible he's done a good job at the micro level, but at the macro level the platform is a cesspool.

This feels like a blatantly unrealistic opinion to have, which goes completely against any observable evidence.

Without a login, you can barely click on any link without being spammed by login prompts. If you visit anyone's posts tab you are greeted with a comically bad collection of posts that only show stale years old tweets that follow no discernible pattern or logic. And you cannot sort by timestamp.

This is comically bad given Twitter's sales pitch of being a microblogging site that lives in the now.

The truth of the matter is that today's Twitter is a sad clone of the glory days Twitter. Lauding these developments as something praise worthy is perplexing.

What?! I don’t use twitter much but in the few times i open it, it’s basically un-browsable, a complete utter shit: the performance, the UI, the overall experience is just worse. Just open a tweet now with a video in it, without being a user, and report back your “improved” experience.

Not saying that's you. Just cannot help going down the memory lane.

I’m not normally an accelerationist about stuff… but now, when it comes to most social media, I’m kinda ok with the idea of it all burning to the ground.

Twitter is eternal; musk & his worldview is temporary.

He seemed to get it. It's too bad he's leaving.

He started putting in ways to change it and put in better incentives (not monetizing this rage baiters, disclosing country of origin). The problem is, the people he screws by doing that are the exact accounts Elon Musk loves, do every time he wanted to make a change cat turd would go screaming to daddy. Hence why I find it so unsurprising he’s quitting.

most people don't pay attention to anything that isn't controversial or extreme. Thats just how our brains work and thats the reason why MrBeast's advice on making it on youtube is the way it is.

I myself always use the "following" tab. So I would like to stay in my bubble, thank you very much.

Pre his takeover , it would more reliably show me my niches of design, technology, gamedev etc

After his take over I’d start seeing more and more boosted content from frankly abhorrent individuals. The whole blue check mark thing being paid instead of truly verified also messed with the algorithm.

I’m sure it’s doable to curate it into what you want again, but it was a night and day shift for me and why I eventually left.

Even filtering out content wasn’t enough because it would get boosted through other means.

And it tries to sneak back in - even outside personal experience, "my feed started getting too toxic again and I had to retrain it with [indiscriminately following/liking a bunch of] cute animal posts" is a weirdly common sentiment I hear from non-tech-literate users (who probably aren't leveraging "proper" signals enough to ever fully clean out their timeline like you or I might).

Every website's "impact" will always be defined by their "default path".

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10098-2

If you get hit by a car once, that doesn't mean you want to get hit by a car more times in the future.

What ends up happening with this algorithm is that the "for you" page is dominated by posts asking open-ended questions for engagement. You want to see game clips or screenshots, but every recommended post will ask "What game do you like the most?" or "What character of game X do you like that most?" A question that the author isn't really interested in knowing, asked only to farm engagement from passerby users.

I think that's a really ugly situation all around and a failure of how the system was designed. People should be able to just tell the algorithm what they want to see without secret trackers that promote perverse incentives.

Also, for twitter in particular, buying a subscription is pretty much buying ads on the For You page. Since users can choose to hide the blue checkmark that indicates they are paying for preferential treatment, that means, effectively, that those are promoted posts that aren't marked as "promoted" like normal ads would have to be. I think that's illegal.

Lots of economic and tech stuff, and some memes.

I often hear people say the same thing about the YouTube algorithm which also confuses me because the YouTube algorithm is amazing at surfacing a wide range of content I'd never had watched back in the subscription days.

I suspect most people who have a bad experience with these algorithms could have a much better experience if they didn't engage in low effort rage bait content.

the story of literally every product Elon has been involved in for the last 26 years.

It became so grating, so many people turned into rage baiters.

And you get to see complete outright racism unchecked. Like comments saying the most vile stuff, like calling something a jewish conspiracy, and they don't even get ratioed. Embarrassing to see it.

If you look at his history, he’s really good at growth hacking apps to pump-and-dump into acquisitions. He hasn’t proven himself in building lasting products.

His last app, Gas, saw meteoric growth from some truly impressive growth hacking on children, but then got acquired by Discord and very soon after tanked. Same with whatever he’d sold to Facebook.

His (and others’ defense) to criticism has always been, “I made a lot of money on an exit,” which, sure, whatever. Personally, I don’t find that very interesting or compelling.

He fit Musk’s profile (brash, extremely online Take Haver), but not the kind of person you want leading product.

1. 10 points, 15 comments

2. 9 points, 17 comments

3. 44 points, 84 comments

That’s not exactly that many doomsters. The first two were barely discussions and the third was a retrospective asking “why didn’t it happen”.

I don’t even really understand why it would be notable that people had that view in the light of mass layoffs. Look at the discussion around Vimeo layoffs:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46707699

(471 points, 512 comments)

Plenty of discussion about the negative impacts in the long term. But it didn’t involve Elon Musk so people didn’t get weirdly defensive about it all.

It has also collapsed on a business front. There are rumors that it has 1/10th the revenue that it did before.

About 90% of the interesting people I ever followed on Twitter are now on Bluesky or Mastodon. They're never coming back.

1) political progressives who liked the way the pre-Elon-Musk management of Twitter engaged in political censorship on the platform (i.e. anyone using the term "nazi" with respect to Twitter or Musk)

2) software engineers who saw a bloated software company summarily fire a bunch of software engineers who the new leadership thought were mostly doing unimportant work, and really wanted it to be true that this was going to tank the company, because it was bad for their job security if it turned out that Twitter didn't actually need that many software engineers after all.

It beats shouting from your window in reach and carrier pigeons in needing less birdfeed, though.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10098-2

When did you ever miss important news if you weren’t on Twitter?